Microsoft executives pitched the new server as providing two "opportunities" for partners.

"The first is to help our customers deploy the product successfully . We also see a sizable opportunity for partners to extend Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 to address needs specific to a particular industry or sub-industry," Chris Caren, general manager of Microsoft's Office Business Applications division, said in a statement.

Microsoft also announced it is shipping service packs for two other important products.

First, the company released Office 2003 Service Pack 3 (SP3) for download. Microsoft said the update primarily focuses on improving security.

Additionally, Microsoft announced Wednesday at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston that it is shipping SP1 of the .NET Micro Framework 2.0. The service pack is designed to give developers and developers and device-makers the ability to help prevent unsigned firmware or application code from being installed on a device.